DETROIT FIGURED THIS OUT a long time ago. Take your basic family sedan, stick a hot motor under the hood and badge it with sporty-sounding initials like RT or SS and voilà: You sell more cars at higher prices.

Attorney Daryl M. Williams not only flies clients, trial witnesses and often a videographer and court reporter all over the western U.S. in a Cessna 421C that he pilots himself-he also trailblazed his own bit of aviation law.

If you own an aircraft and lease it out, can you be liable for damages caused when the lessee is operating it? The answer reminds me of a joke my securities law professor, Louis Loss, used to tell about a client wanting to hire a one-handed lawyer so the lawyer couldn't say: "Well, on the one hand...but on the other hand."

WHEN 2009 BEGAN, the preowned market was like a punch-drunk boxer trying to regain his footing. Down but not out throughout the year, the industry struggled to build strength and stability after absorbing an uppercut delivered by an economic near-catastrophe and then a barrage of power-of-the-pen jabs thrown by often-sensationalistic journalists.

"Empty legs," the so-called repositioning flights that have no passengers, represent a growing marketplace of bargain charter opportunities, and it's easy to see why. Many charter flights carry only crew because the aircraft is on its way to pick up travelers or going somewhere empty after dropping them off.

TOM BUFFENBARGER heads the powerful International Machinists union, which has more than 90,000 members who work in the aerospace industry. He says he'll be watching President Obama's State of the Union address in January, and is hoping to hear an eight-word phrase he says is long overdue: "Business aviation is vital to America's economic recovery."